Bang the Drum Sustainably

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“An Energy Department watchdog last week questioned hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy efficiency stimulus expenditures to a group of African drummers and a media company with ties to top officials who oversaw stimulus awards,” Lachlan Markay writes at the Washington Free Beacon. “The groups received a combined $630,000 in grants under DOE’s stimulus-funded Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant Program to monitor and inspect energy efficiency retrofit efforts, despite their lack of experience on such projects:”

[District Department of the Environment] failed to consult with its general counsel or ethics officer before granting the funds to [Prosperity Media Enterprises] based on a proposal that, the IG found, may have improperly inflated the group’s qualifications.

The selection committee gave PME’s proposal a score of 97 out of a possible 100, which the IG said “was clearly not warranted.” Similar scores were given to other organizations with significantly more experience in managing energy efficiency projects.

Neither PME nor a group called the African Heritage Drummers and Dancers, which also received weatherization funds, had much experience in the area.

See, this is why government is so wasteful and bureaucratic — couldn’t the African Heritage Drummers and Dancers simply have been sent over to Harry Reid’s office, to provide the percussive backing for his legendary Cowboy Poetry sessions?

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